


Maybe Later

by Catchclaw



Series: Mental Mimosa [72]
Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Fluff, M/M, Memories, Steve Rogers's Birthday
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-04
Updated: 2018-07-04
Packaged: 2019-06-05 05:03:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,197
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15163250
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Catchclaw/pseuds/Catchclaw
Summary: Now the years have melted through your fingers, leaked away without giving you any say and yet somehow, you’re living together again. It’s not like it was before--but nothing is here, on the other side of your life.





	Maybe Later

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: Dawn. Prompt from this [generator](http://colormayfade.tumblr.com/generator).
> 
> Happy birthday, Steve Rogers! Have some angsty fluff.

Steve's never been a late sleeper, not even when he was a kid. You can remember stumbling through the early morning dark to his house before school, so you all could walk the rest of the way together, and he’d be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, practically, face scrubbed clean and working his way through his second piece of toast, babbling happily to his mom about whatever book he’d gotten up at the crack of whatever to finish. And when you slumped down at the table beside him and buried your face in your arms, moaning about how much you wanted to go back to sleep, he’d slap you on the shoulder and pour you a glass of milk and repeat the story, the whole freaking story, to you.

When you were older and the world was on the brink of falling apart, you learned to sleep through it, him easing out of your arms before any intelligent rooster crowed and padding out to the tiny kitchen, or to your shabby living room. Shabby because there were better ways to spend your money then than on furniture and rugs and such; hand-me-downs from your sister, your neighbors, the nearest street corner were more than fine. There were books everywhere then, too--stacks of them under the beat-up coffee table and behind the settee and up against the wall by the window. That was the best part of that room, the window: wide and tall and facing east so that it framed your little corner of the city as the sun rose, as the dawn lumbered up and pushed away the last of the night.

That’s where you’d found him, most mornings, perched on the sill like some skinny blond cat, drinking his piss poor version of coffee and dreaming about the day to come; worrying, sometimes, about the days that lay ahead. There were mornings when you’d lay your head on his shoulder and sigh and get your last ten or fifteen right there, resting against him as he squeezed your hands and looked out over the world. Others, you’d be awake enough to sneak up on him, to wait until his cup was empty and then grab him and drag him, hook, line and sinker, right back to your bed and kiss him until you were both stupid with need, with love and lust and everything in between, until his face was hot against your neck, his hands clutched in your hair, his voice hoarse from begging you to make him come.

And then some mornings, you wouldn’t be speaking. Some mornings, he’d get up still mad about whatever argument you’d had the night before and on those mornings, he’d sit in the window with his head against the glass, or with his fingers strung outside in the quiet air and ignore you, jaw set and eyes set on some far horizon. He didn’t get pissed off very often back then--at you, anyway--but when he got a bee in his bonnet about something, hell, he really went for it. But then, he’s never done things by half-measures, has he?

Now the years have melted through your fingers, leaked away without giving you any say and yet somehow, you’re living together again. It’s not like it was before--but nothing is here, on the other side of your life. Your apartment’s a lot bigger, for one thing; the place you lived in back then would nearly all fit in your living room now. All four burners work in the kitchen and the furniture’s all in the same sort of design: warm woods and creamy cushions that sink sigh when you sit. There are still a million books, but now they sit on shelves, march across the walls in neat, ordered lines, and there are whole walls of windows, long stretches that sweep curves, but no sills. No easy places for Steve to hide out and perch.

You each have your own bedroom, now. You don’t sleep in the same bed. You don’t sleep together at all. Or kiss. Or touch in any of the small ways that you’re just starting to remember, to recall enough to really fucking miss.

He doesn’t know you yet, this new you, broken and mended so many times that it’s taken you months to be able to see all the cracks, all the ways that HYDRA left you shattered. Your body’s done better than your head; it’s happy to remember every busted bone, every cracked rib, the origin story of each and every damn scar.

Your heart is getting there, too; has been since the first morning you woke up in this place, an hour or so after dawn, and wandered out to find him in a chair by wall of windows in the living room, holding a cold cup of coffee and staring dreamily out at the green, at all the trees that lie between you and the city that you both once so loved. His body may be different, his shoulders broader than they were way back when, his arms wider, but the look on his face as the sun caught it, those rosy fingers petting his face, was exactly like you’d remembered: soft and centered and so much _Steve_ that it’d make your knees weak--you, an agent of death, of other people’s destruction--and you’d nearly put your fist through the wall to keep from tumbling over.

And the way he’d looked at you as he’d turned, a little startled by the sound, had been so loving, so sweet, for one perfect instant as if he saw his Buck, the one who was all in one piece, instead of you, a cracked mosaic of the man he remembers, that you’d wanted to go to him, felt this insistent pull in your gut that made you want to go to him, to run your hands, metal and flesh, through the sleepy mess of his hair and tip his head back, watch his eyes flutter as you bend down to kiss him.

But that look had lasted only an instant, and in the next, his face had shuttered, the openness hidden again behind a friendly mask, the same one he’d worn since you’d arrived here, one that said: _Slow. We’re going to take this slow_.

“Hey,” he’d said then. “Up at last, huh? You want some breakfast? I think there’s some coffee left.”

It’s been three months like this, three months of the familiar mixed in with the new: Steve doing crosswords after dinner, talking to himself at the counter while you do the dishes. Steve jumping out of a plane five steps ahead of you, trusting that you’ll be right behind. Steve singing along to Bing Crosby as you spar, the two of you on the balls of your feet as you dance around the training room, looking for the other’s blind spots; no matter how many lucky shots he gets in, he still can’t carry a tune worth a damn. Steve falling asleep on the couch, a book folded over his face. You still sit for a while and watch him when he does that, like you did back then; marvel now at the ease of his breath, the untroubled rise and fall of his chest, some part of you still expecting to hear a rattle, a cough.

It feels like you’re drifting closer to what you once had, though, what your private lives were like before war and madmen and the riptides of terror and time. He stands a little nearer to you now, doesn’t make a point of edging carefully around you if you meet in a doorway or pass in the hall. He’ll let your skin brush now, let your arms touch when you sit on the sofa and watch TV. He smiles at you, too, doesn’t hold back when he’s happy or even when he’s pissed off or sad; he’s stopped treating you like a explosive eggshell, like the wrong word might just as easily crush you as set you off. He’s acting like Steve around you again. Almost.

Except you wake up hot now, your skin close to scalding. You wake up in the dead quiet of night and you want him--his hands, his mouth, his cock. You ache to be under him, to watch him lean back and groan with how good it feels to have you inside him, to be full, and there are some nights when you have to lock yourself in your bathroom to stop yourself from going to him, from taking the last steps in a journey that started when the world was still young and bury yourself in his bed; to take him in your arms and hold him hard and make him feel good again.

You remember what it was like to love him like that, to feel how much he loved you, and if there are tears on your cheeks some nights, they’re born of grief as much as frustration. You miss him. He’s right there in the next room and you miss him so bad that it hurts.

It only gets worse.

Because he starts touching you more. Little things that add up to a lot. He starts throwing his arm around your shoulders when he’s extra jazzed about something. He holds you down longer on those rare occasions when you end up on your back on the mat, bested by his cleverness or the sheer force of his strength; holds you down and beams and only when you’ve held up your hands and said uncle will he clamber off and reach down to give you a hand. He sits close to you on the couch, deliberately, doesn’t wait for an accidental brush; settles down right at your side and leans into you just enough, just a touch, so that you know it’s ok to lean back.

And that makes the days better, brighter, but it makes the nights longer and harder and sometimes, you have to put a hand on yourself and close your eyes and reach for the sound of his voice, the new-old feel of his skin, before the swell of your wanting crests and you can tumble back to sleep again, your fingers sticky with memories, with dreams of the days yet to come.

And then one day the calendar turns, June into July, and you have an idea. It’s either genius or the biggest mistake you’ve made in this, your new lifetime, but hell. What’ve you got to lose?

Everything, of course. The past, the future, more. But if you don’t do this now--do _something_ that’s deliberate and planned--you might reach out without thinking at the wrong moment and the house of careful cards you’ve built with him again could all come tumbling down.

So.

On the third night of July, you set an alarm and get up before dawn.

You set the cake on the counter--a small, sweet thing Nat hid for you in the back of the pantry--and reach for the percolator, quietly run the tap. Measure out the coffee, add it to the pot, and set the thing on the burner to heat.

Outside, the black is just easing up towards gray, the first fissures of light slipping over the trees. Your heart pounding rabbit fast and you know you should be scared or worried at least--what the hell will you do if he pushes you away?--but you’re grinning anyway because it feels good, getting up this early, sitting on the edge of the day and feeling like all its possibilities are just within reach.

You time it almost right: the coffee’s hot, the cake is set, the candles are stuck in kinda haphazard, but when Steve pads into the kitchen, shirtless and rubbing his eyes and looking half awake, half fucking confused, the damn things aren’t lit yet.

“Uh,” Steve says, like his tongue’s made of wool. “Huh? Buck?”

You start to reach for your lighter, but hell. Forget it.

“Hey,” you say. “Happy birthday, Stevie.”

His whole face changes--cobwebs knocked away, sleepiness forgotten--goes bright and open instead and god, you’d forgotten how beautiful he could be, even at five o’clock in the morning.

“ _Stevie_ ,” he says. “You haven’t called me that since, what? 1943?”

“That long, huh?” You take a chance and edge around the counter, step into his personal space. “God, you’re getting old, kid.”

His hand finds your right arm, tentative, curls gently around your elbow, the whole time watching your face. “Well, I hate to break it to you, but nobody’s in this room’s a spring chicken.”

You open your arms and draw him closer, slide your fingers down the warm curves of his back, and some part of you marvels at how easy this is, how sweet and good. How familiar.

“I got you a cake,” you say.

“Mmmm.” He nuzzles your jaw. “I can see that.”

“You want some now, birthday boy? There’s coffee, too.”

He strokes your hair, tangles his fist gentle in the ends, and rubs his smile against yours. “You know what?” he says, soft. “Maybe later.”  



End file.
